


The Boy Who Called Down a Ghost

by ivoryandhorn



Category: Kuroshitsuji | Black Butler
Genre: Alternate Universe - Cyberpunk, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-03-31
Updated: 2010-03-31
Packaged: 2018-07-28 23:42:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,137
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7661776
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ivoryandhorn/pseuds/ivoryandhorn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cyberpunk AU. The contract begins.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Boy Who Called Down a Ghost

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks and a thousand thousand apologies to Alice Sheldon. :D;;

The holocasts are all full of the news. Go on, take a look, there's one right next to you—don't worry about which channel, 'cause this shit is on _all_ of them.

First view: the top of a tower, rounded for maximum area to perimeter ratio—zoom in to three stories a little over halfway up, highlighted by the rest of the tower fading to semi-transparency—watch the windows reflect back the towers around it as the holo revolves, even though it's the only one you see—the reporter's touched up voice reminds you that the home you see belonged to biggest of business wigs, the Phantomhives. Her voice sounds just a little fake, obvious only if you know to listen for the telltale reverb of a techie's hand. But why do you care if it's fake, because her voice is _gorgeous_ , perfectly modulated for maximum solemnity and seriosity, and you feel so _scared_ for these guys, these rich bitches who are so rich they can stay organic through and through 'cause they have people to do their interfacing for them. Those poor, sweet, innocent organisms. Nobody mods a voice for _solemnity_ and _seriosity_ unless some bad shit went down, do they. O Phantomhives! Oh _no!_

Second view: shock and awe, the highlighted floors explode—puffs of smoke and plumes of flame, shockingly primitive in this fireproof polymer day and age, all carefully positioned for the best amount of dramatic effect. The reporter's voice goes grave and melancholy, a complete one-eighty, and anyone listening can't believe some no good bunch of terrorists would dare to kill a bunch of wonderful people like the Phantomhives. Like, seriously man, what the fuck is their problem? 

The reporter goes on to talk about suspects and investigations and blah blah _fucking_ blah, who gives a shit about who _did_ it, everyone's already made up their tiny little minds. I bet you fifty cred the only thing anyone cares about is who the fuck's going to run Funtom Corp now that St. Vincent of Phantomhive, he of the shady business deal and corporate espionage that'd make your hair turn pink, belongs on a mortuary slab—if they could find enough of him, that is. Bombed to death in his own goddamn home! Better stock up on bluescreen cubes and phaser guns, sweet pea, who knows where the fucking terrorists are gonna strike next. No doubt they were trying to take out an illuminary of the modern financial sphere; that pioneer of children's toys and holocades has been so cruelly snatched from us. That's what the reporter's telling you, at any rate, voice resonating with faked-in rage and sorrow.

Oh, and like, they can't find the Funtom kid's corpse or whatever. Who the fuck cares? The terrorists probably tossed him off the tower, those high-ups are always doing shit like that, which is damn inconsiderate if you ask me. Nobody likes getting meat splatter on their fancy 50k-a-pop organic-leather-really-no- _really_ designer boots.

*

It'd be nice and dramatic if the scene was dark, but it's not—this is a lab, and all labs are full of bright white lights that make every crack show up ten times as harsh. You'd expect one this size to be full of people, wouldn’t you—scientists kicking back while assistants and technicians and frazzled interns rush around like something sparked the wrong way in their _sit the fuck down_ circuits. But no, it isn't: for all its hugeness and sterility, the only people in _this_ lab are three peeps standing around in white labcoats, while a couple androids stand motionless and powered down in a corner, about as interesting as the computer parts scattered all over the lab tables. 

One of the dudes has a face like Abraham Lincoln, and I _mean_ a face like fucking Abraham Lincoln. He probably spent hours paging through some surgeon's face database picking the one he wanted, and that shitty-ass photocopy cost him more than you would ever make in a fucking _lifetime_ if you lived here (okay, so inflation might've had a little bit to do with that too, whatever.). But he's the guy talking, so we'll listen in anyway.

"Subject number fifteen, male, approximately ten years old. Blood type A, and…hello."

"Told you," some other dude says. This guy looks like Brad Pitt, which is a face that's at least semi-hot and belonged to someone alive in the past few fucking centuries (thought I'd give a date, didn't you. Hah!). He also sounds smug as fuck, don't you just wish you could tear that photocopy face in two with a scalpel? Whaddaya think, would the graft peel off like the skin of a grape? Or would your knife get stuck in all that synthetic tissue and he'd just call up his surgeon for a retouch while his security droids hauled you outside to rip out your spine by way of your stomach? Tough call, I'm leaning towards the grape skin myself.

Whoops, those guys've been speaking this whole hate-on. Better tune you back in.

"Pure?" This isn't a guy, it's a chick, and she doesn't have a face I recognize, which automatically makes her interesting, if boringly normal looking. "How many credits did you waste on _that?"_

"None," Brad Pitt says, smiling twice as wide. "I just had a droid go down to market and grab him off the street. Must've been a runaway, it was pure fucking luck I snagged a kid like him. No hormones, no implants, no mods, not even any trackers. _Nothing."_

"Well, I suppose if he doesn't work, no one will," Abraham Lincoln says, like it's some big damn favor he's doing the other two

"Or we could go back to adult trials," the lady counters. "Your theory was that children have less cluttering up their heads; I say that their minds aren't developed enough to handle the subroutines we're asking of the brain with the procedure."

"Connie, you _know_ we agreed to go to teens after kids," Brad Pitt says, like they've had this argument a hundred fucking times before. "We'll get to the adults eventually. It's just that kiddie trials are so much easier, and cheaper. At least for now, at any rate." 

"Yes, but that doesn't make them any less _useless,"_ Connie says pointedly. Abraham Lincoln looks angry. Or maybe constipated. I told you his face-job was a shitty-ass one; almost no emotion at all. It might as well _be_ a fucking prosthetic, some latex head yanked tight over his real one, for all the articulation it's got. Brad Pitt, now Brad Pitt at least has a photocopy that might even have been worth the credit it cost, even if it's still a fucking photocopy. 

In any case, lemme direct your attention over to that wall over there—yeah, that one, the one lined with those cryo-coffins. They're usually for the old and sick who can't bear to die yet, on the off-chance that SCIENCE! will save their asses before their bodies wear out, or at least care enough to try. These wealthy bitches are using them to keep their test subjects nice and cool until they get unfrozen. Look, they're unfreezing one right now—the thaw sequence counts down and look at that baby open up, smoke rolling all over the fucking place, it's like a goddamn movie. A couple lab assistant droids, who had been previously chillaxing in a corner and recharging their batteries, stir to life as Brad Pitt punches a command or two into the lab's central computer. They look like skeletons, narrow straight limbs with bulging gel sacs to protect the joints. All the processors and microchips and shit sit in their narrow torsos, sensory equipment on their head-like places—except for the haptic sensors, which sit right at the tippy-tips of their wire-laden hands. They look human the way stick figures look human. Clean blue lights blink to life on their face plates and along their limbs as they unplug and make their mechanical way over to the opening cryo-coffin. 

There's a kid inside, maybe ten years, just like Honest Abe said. If you knew what that Phantomhives looked like—and hey, you might not, they can do some pretty sick shit with on-the-fly CGI these days, a lot of the richies use it to keep their holo appearances looking fresh and sweet and incidentally not a whole lot like themselves. So as to keep off the paparazzi, y'know. But anyway, in case you don't know what they look like, you do now, or at least their dear sweet missing tot, 'cause the poor kid being rubbed down by droids bearing towels is, indeed, Ciel Phantomhive—apple of his daddy's eye, launcher of a thousand _awwwwww!_ s. He makes a little hurt sound when the light hits his iced up eyes. He doesn't quite look like he's all there, though it'll fade fast—he was only under ice for a month, tops. He looks scared. He'd probably like some clothes. Fortunately, one of the droids is kind enough to drape a hospital gown over him. If you look close, you can see something metal on the base of his neck, the only interruption of his organic integrity—courtesy of A, B, and C over here. 

"Bring him over here," Brad Pitt says. The droids pick up the limp little kiddie and carry him over to something that looks like the dentist's chair of your worst nightmares. Abraham Lincoln takes him the droid and lays him down; little Ciel's still too out of it from ice-sickness to fight very much, so Connie-girl gets him strapped down nice and snug without too much fuss. Brad Pitt punches another command into the central computer and the droids go back into sleep mode, walking back to their charge units. 

Ciel's waking up well and truly now—fluorescent lights in your head will do that to a tyke. He's really fighting the straps now, not that it does much good: they strapped him down _good._ For all her protests, Connie's going into scientist mode now, along with her boyfriends Honest Abe and Brad Pitt: setting up and calibrating the equipment, making sure everything's plugged in juuuuust right. 

Headphones attached to the dentist chair and raised and fitting into his ears; they do double duty, keeping his head straight and blocking out any "sensory interference", as those scientist-y types say on their dry little equipment reports. Ciel's _really_ going at it now, crying and kicking (well, trying) and yelling for his poor dead Mommy and Daddy. It's such a racket, it really is, and apparently Connie agrees, 'cause she swabs down his helpless tied down arm with a bit of alcohol and injects something the color of lime soda into his arm. Ciel's shouting chokes off with a sob, he goes totally limp. Connie helpfully pulls his eyelids open and squeezes in a couple drops of stuff to keep them wet enough, 'cause with that soda-pop shit in his bloodstream ain't nothing in Ciel's body moving without some outside help.

Abe Lincoln finishes cooing over the viewer and rolls it over. The viewer looks like one of those idiotic old-fashioned hairdresser things, those big round bowls full of hot air. It encloses Ciel's head entirely, and its inside is filled with dozens of little ultra-high-resolution video screens that fill his entire range of view. From the opposite end of the viewer comes huge heavy bundle wires and snake down the floor and plug into the central computer. There another, smaller bunch of wires that snakes along the big bundle but never joins it, plugging into a completely different piece of equipment entirely; this one goes to a little neural jack that Abe slides this one home into Ciel's new receptor. Don't worry, he's too paralyzed to do much about this new, unusual, and not entirely pleasant sensation, though he's completely conscious. All their precious preparations don't mean shit if their test subject's not conscious enough to keep the ol' neurons firing. 

"Everything ready?" Brad Pitt asked. He's been fooling around on the main console—not the one Honest Abe was on, that other one—this entire time. 

Connie double-checks everything, including Honest Abe's work. He doesn't look too happy about it, but eh, whatcha gonna do? "Yes. Let's get this over with."

Abraham Lincoln rushes over to the monitoring screens, rubbing his hands with anticipation. "Punch it!" he says gleefully. Connie rolls her eyes—wouldn’t you? Star Trek is _so_ last you-know—and crosses her arms. 

Brad Pitt punches it. 

All those little screens in the viewer light up, flashing tera, beta, _exa_ bytes of data into Ciel's eyes, as fast as his poor optic nerves can handle and then, as the machinery really starts working up a hum, even more. Ciel's body twitches, paralyzing agent or no; if it were you sitting in that chair right now we'd be screaming bloody murder as our brains were stuffed fit to bursting, mental processors burning right the fuck out. There's nothing to interrupt the data flow; remember those earbuds? And poor little Ciel can't do a motherfucking thing. Not even scream.

Abe Lincoln hopefully monitors the dataflow in the neural jack. It picks up everything that's fluttering through Ciel's head, mirroring all the data flowing into and out of him, and the readout is boringly normal. Connie looks very smug. Ciel's brain is probably on the verge of burning out—his little ten-year-old body's straining against the polymer straps like a salmon leaping up stream, like they do in those really old nature docs. What's happening to his head is strong enough to even cut through the paralyzing agent. Bet you're glad that that's not you. Or maybe you want to set him free? The tyke's like _ten years old,_ after all. That's awful young to end up a vegetable for life. 

Don't worry, the cavalry's on its way. Kinda. You'll see. 

So the data readouts are busy being normal like a fucking normal thing, and Connie's about to start the let's-put-the-plug argument with dear ol' Abe when suddenly! Something unusual occurs!

…which is to say that that readout Abe's been watching makes a hella high jump and stays there. Did they hit on some particularly busy section of the interwebs? Or is something especially big coming down the pike? Now they're running around like those hypothetical assistants and whatnot that I mentioned earlier. What is it? Could it be what they've been fishing for all this time? Ciel's pale as snow crash, sweating all over; his little fingers dig into the foam padding of his dentist chair from mental hell. He's crying. Good thing too, 'cause with this spike ain't no one going to be remembering to keep his baby blues from drying out. 

Abe's shouting. This is insane! is what he's saying. He's so excited he might piss his pants. He's holding on to that console like he's got a hard-on for it, and—yeah, this time I'm just gonna leave that one right there because there're some things even I, ominiscent POV that I am, have like _no_ interest in seeing. So okay. Abe shouting, Connie dumbfounded, Brad Pitt trying to get them both to do their fucking jobs, damn it, remember the drills, _spring the goddamn trap you fucktards—_

And then it's gone. 

The readout's back to its boring normal level. The chickens stop running around and cluster around the console; Abrahma Lincoln's excitement wood is very abruptly gone, which no doubt causes the other two to emit little sighs of relief. The machine's spitting out a hardcopy of the spike levels for them to examine. The only real difference in the experiment from pre-spike is that Ciel is now lying there so…very…still. Think they burned him out for real? Maybe he's not just a vegetable, he's fucking _dead,_ not just higher brain function but everything else seared out of his brain, wiped clean as a hard-drive that strayed a little too close to a giant electromagnet. 

Nobody's paying any attention to the back of the lab. That's cool, 'cause we're gonna do it for them. And what we're seeing is one of the assist droids coming to life, soft hum lost under the three dumbshits currently arguing over where their precious dataspike went oh noes, and it detaches quietly from its battery coupling. Wait, you might be thinking at this point, I thought those things were programmed? Something about Brad Pitt tak-tak-takking away at a console earlier on? And hey, you're right. They were. They are. 

At least, they're supposed to be. 

The one that just detached itself moves up behind ABC. Connie looks up, spots it, opens her mouth to ask Brad a question—and it breaks her jaw. Now, you have to understand that these assist droids aren't all that heavy, at least compared to some. Nowadays you can get polymers spun in a lab that are stronger, more resilient, easier to clean, more inert than friggin' stainless steel. And lighter, let's not forget that. But there's still some metal in it, at the joints especially, and a rough sphere of super-dense light-weight polymer casing and minimal steel armature smashing into your face at seven hundred miles per hour is _still_ a fist smashing into your face at rather uncomfortably close to the speed of sound. 

Before the other two can react, the droid proceeds to snap her neck. They're backing away now, Brad Pitt to jab helplessly at a suddenly and very stubbornly unresponsive computer, Abraham to dash for the door. It obligingly slides open as he nears it, but he never manages to exeunt. You see, his way out had been rather inconsiderately blocked by Brad Pitt's fancy-ass Sony Shitsuji service android standing still as steel on the other side. Abe breaks his nose running into it, and then proceeds to completely lose his head, by which I mean the Sony Shitsuji reached out with its perfectly proportioned arms and ripped it right off. There's lots of metal in those fuckers; they need more hardware than the dumb assists that hang out in Brad Pitt's lab dreaming about electric sheep. Those things have a grip that'd bend steel. You don't want to know about what passes for their hand-eye coordination. You'd shit yourself right then and there.

Brad Pitt's the only one left now, cornered by two of his suddenly uncontrollable pet robots. The Sony Shitsuji has red eyes now; judging by how he's pissed his pants you can probably guess that they're not supposed to be that color. It's like something right out of a fucking anime, evil robots with glowing red eyes, but sometimes you just don't fuck with the classics, y'know? Brad Pitt goes down easy, and you can see he knows it as he dies; he doesn't even have a gun on him—who packs heat when you're in your own fucking home? A home that guarded by fucking robots who are supposed to be too three-ruled to take any actions even remotely resembling free will?

Ciel's unconscious for all of this, by the way. The assist droid neatly plugs itself back into the wall as if nothing'd happened, except for the splatter of blood across its torso. The Sony Shitsuji, however…well, first let me take a moment to say god _damn_ is that one sweet droid—it's a personal service model, most advanced artificial intelligence (for certain definitions of "intelligence", at least until now) on the market for civilian use. It's meant to anticipate the needs of its owner and act accordingly, not just based on what gets plugged in when it first opens its eyes but by observing its owner's behavior afterwards: the perfect butler, essentially. The chassis on this one's a custom job, so smooth and even it might almost look like real skin, and probably feels like it to—silicon, of course, a lab-grown epidermis wouldn't stand up too well to the wear and tear of that heavy metal body and is kind of really fucking creepy besides. 

The Shitsuji walks right over to the poor little Phantomhive and starts unhooking him from the dentist chair from hell. It's got a smooth, natural gait, hair that gleams in the empty fluorescents of the room, and eyes like big clumps of LEDs. That suit it's got on isn't _really_ Victorian; what, you think anybody can actually find any vintage shit these days? But it's a damn good replica, and it's made out of _actual_ natural woven fabrics so you know, maybe it's not the real deal, but it's still some pretty hot shit. Brad Pitt must've been rolling in it. Too bad he's no longer around to keep at it.

Equipment flickers off as the Sony Shitsuji walks past them, screens flickering madly, far too fast for the human eye to follow—I'd turn away right about now, if I were you. They go through logout and shutdown sequences one by one as the Sony Shitsuji starts unstrapping little Ciel from the equipment trying to swallow his sanity alive. What's running the show now? What gave that Sony Shitsuji it's red, red stoplight eyes? Lemme just say right now, it's not little Ciel—the poor bastard's still out cold, or near enough as makes no difference. 

The Sony Shitsuji scoops the little tyke up in its arms. Ciel moves, faintly—he still doesn't look too good, even with the soda-pop having worn off, and he keeps his eyes tight shut—and carries the kid out of the lab, which seals itself shut behind him and proceeds to self-destruct by way of unhappy equipment. You are, in fact, seeing an _actual smile_ on its face as the droid walks out the front door. The Sony Shitsuji's facial apparatus is just that good.

*

Goddamn are those holocasts buzzing again. PHANTOMHIVE HEIR RETURNS! they yowl. It's all over the channels. Look, on that one you can see some dumbshit reporter trying to get a statement out of Madame Red about the mysterious return of her beloved nephew. Nobody knows what she really looks like; like so many others with the cred to afford it, she has a deal with the holocaust networks to have her image replaced by something else—in this case, a scarlet humanoid that doesn't look a thing like her, except for the propensity to dress is such brightfully organic red.

Over on _that_ holocast you can see the three floors that were once the Phantomhive mansion in the middle of having its outside refurbished and repaired. The screen's split with a view of Ciel walking through the building lobby under voiceover; he's looking a lot better now, dressed in the snazziest fashion of the day, neat blue-black suit that hugs his skinny little-kid bod. His eyes are covered up, an arch of black plastic that gloms sweet and smooth to the pale skin below and above his eyes, a chasm that breaks his heart-shaped face in two. He can see you, you can't see in; all you get is you own face, distorted and tossed back from the mirrorshade's center. On either side of his head, just below his temples, the controllers have been neatly grafted to the skin. He's young enough that they'll need regular replacing as he grows; looks like Ciel's given up on the organic integrity that marked his parents as too cool for school in favor of running it. 

Some reporter shoves a recorder into his face as he turns to enter the lift. A white-gloved hand shoves it away and, when the dumbass persists, crushes it without pause. As the lift doors shut Ciel Phantomhive off from the world, he doesn't smile; but the Sony Shitsuji standing behind him smiles enough for both.

Lift doors shut, and Ciel Phantomhive goes up, up, up, into the tower that houses his home. The Sony Shitsuji—and whatever's now in it—goes up with him.

*

*

*

What, you may be asking, that's it? What the fuck _happened_ there? You know, in the lab, with the dentist chair? Copout! 

Now, see, this is where we come back to the whole omniscient POV narrator thing. 'Cause while _I_ know what happened—I'd be a pretty shitty omniscient POV if I didn't—I dunno if I should be telling you. Narrative integrity and all that shit. Hell, I shouldn't even been talking to you right now. Every fourth wall is sacred. Being self-referential is twee as fuck. Sadface in snow.

But I _could_ tell you, if I were inclined in that general direction. I could. Would you like to know? I bet you do. Maybe I should, for completion's sake. Wouldn’t want you to get a hernia or something from not knowing. Maybe…

Nah.


End file.
